The essence of cringe comedy seems to be characters governed by their shadow. It’s not repressed and glimpsed under stress via projection behaviors. It’s in charge and directing behavior largely unregulated.
A good example of it is the title character in The Mick played by Caitlin Olson, and seems to be an extension of the one she played in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Dee.
Mick always blurts out what she’s thinking, jumps to conclusions, is short-sighted etc etc. But not in a clueless or id-driven way. And lacking the dark nobility to be antiheroic. Antiheroes and antiheroines aren’t cringe.
She is portrayed as smart but as pulling consequentially stupid jackass moves that female characters don’t generally do, due to being ungoverned.
Women are rarely written as geniuses but rarely written as jackasses (jennyasses?) either. The harmless ditzy type is more common.
argument from 2017 that ‘maladjusted party girl’ is the right mental model for antiheroine. Maladjusted party girl types have a sort of tragic quality to them that the cringe jackass-heroine lacks. But there’s some relationship. Comic antiheroine?
Cringe characters have evolved really well in 2 decades. In hindsight, Michael Scott was too stupid to be cringe. You get proper cringe when the character is clearly smart enough to know better but does cringe shit anyway because the shadow is driving and they can’t help it.
Cringe is actually really old. I think some early Chaplin pioneered elements of cringe, though he still had a lot of inherited baggage from the pure simple-minded physical comedy he branched away from.
But “shadow in charge” is a larger category than cringe comedy, and despite overlaps, is not to be confused with things like cluelessness or childish id-driven or antiheroics. I’m looking for other expressions of the idea.
One near-candidate might be Dexter. The shadow isn’t in charge, but only because a “code” has been imposed through strong conditioning by his adopted father to allow it to safely run the show. It’s like the self is a consultant keeping the shadow in check.
But I don’t want stylized Jekyll-and-Hyde examples like Dexter or Tyler Durden. More pure paradigm examples. I think it’s more commonly a comedy archetype because in drama, unless you create mannered justifications, the character will realistically crash and burn too easily.
It’s more commonly a female character type, not sure why. Male shadow-driven types always end up too stylized to be interesting. Or in a safely socialized role like the town drunk. I’m racking my brain and failing to come up with good male shadow-driven characters.
In real life the shadow-driven type seems equally common in teenaged boys and girls but in adulthood it is rarer in men. Possibly because it’s hard to survive in that mode too long outside of rare careers like music, and harder for men to go dependent.